War, Power, and Power Struggle

From a Marxist perspective, power is defined as the ability to control the means of production. In political terms, it refers to the capacity to lead and regulate the actions and decisions of a society or state. Legitimacy—understood as the acceptance of a power structure’s rightfulness—stands in inverse relation to the use of coercion: the more legitimate a government is, the less it must rely on force to maintain control.

By the same logic, the power of the working class is rooted, first and foremost, in its ability to exert control over the process of production. Politically, as the influence and leadership of the working class expand within society, so too does its capacity to resist the coercive mechanisms of the state. Since the state itself is a highly organized and unified apparatus, the ability of workers to assert their will depends directly on their own level of organization.

Restating these seemingly self-evident points is important. It reminds us that even where interests fully align, calls issued from afar by communist groups to unorganized and dispossessed masses remain, in practice, ineffectual.

In other words, the balance of power ultimately depends on the capacity to organize and systematically lead struggle. Simply taking to the streets or chanting slogans does not, in itself, determine the outcome of any transformation. Moreover, calls for mass mobilization are not exclusive to communists. Today, a broad spectrum of figures—from Reza Pahlavi to  Netanyahu and Trump—urge people to prepare for street mobilization in the wake of military operations aimed at overthrowing the regime. Setting aside the war-driven inclinations of ineffective cult aka 'worker-communist' or that of Reza Pahlavi, what does fundamentally distinguish their appeals from those of Netanyahu and Trump?

The answer lies in their reliance on the vast state apparatuses of the United States and Israel. They understand well that in the absence of an organized, mass-based force, even if millions were to heroically overthrow the Islamic Republic, its successor would be determined not by the people’s will, nor by marginal actors such as anti-communist factions or Reza Pahlavi, but by organized powers like the United States and Israel.

The aim of these remarks is neither to foster despair nor to restate the obvious. Rather, it is to underscore the central challenge—the decisive obstacle to shaping change in favor of the working masses. Organization is not a situational tactic but a constant necessity: a vital condition that, in times of war and peace alike, remains the only meaningful answer to the challenges ahead.